bunnie

When you’ve got a month worth of blog postings it’s pretty difficult to choose one photograph that sums it all up. This one shows the tour group from MIT Media Lab in ESD garb ready for their tour of Okano SMT and Speaker Factory. It was part of a tour of Shenzhen aimed at bringing graduate students up to speed on what it means to manufacture products in the city. Luckily, Freaklabs member [Akiba] was one of the staff members of the program and blogged extensively about the experience. At first glance his page full of post abstracts looks really boring, but click through because both his recount and the commented images associated with each day are fun and fascinating ways to tag along with the group.

If you’re really good with faces you can pick [Bunnie Huang] out of the lineup above (he’s the third from the right). He had the original idea for the program and brought aboard a few others to help make the thing a success. The group toured a wide range of factories and parts markets in the city. This included your traditional electronics manufacturing venues but there was even a side trip to a diaper and feminine napkin plant to see the non-electronic factories in operation. In addition to tours there were lectures by industry members like HAXLR8R, a group that specializes in helping start-ups navigate the manufacturing jungle.

[Bunnie Huang], creator of the Chumby and artisan of chips and electrons, is building his own completely open source laptop. It’s called the Novena, and is powered by a quad-core ARM CPU, it’s got enough bells and whistles to make any hacker happy including an on-board FPGA, dual Ethernet ports, and enough GPIO pins to do some crazy, crazy stuff.

[Bunnie]’s laptop is an attempt to create a completely open-source laptop capable of some light code development, and web browsing. Every single chip on [Bunnie]’s laptop has a datasheet available (without requiring an NDA, unlike the Raspberry Pi), meaning this laptop might be the beginning of a completely open source laptop.

Officially, this laptop is a one-off project made just for [Bunnie]. He’ll be spending the next few months validating all features on the board and making a proper case. [Bunnie] says a few people may be interested in their own Novena (smart one, that guy), so he might consider a Kickstarter campaign in a few months. Don’t expect it to be cheap, but if you’d like to try your hand at making your own, all the files are up on the Novena wiki.

Over at Make, [Phil Torrone] has done an interview with [Bunnie Huang]. [Bunnie] has been a major contributor to the pages of Hackaday as far back as we can remember. He started in 2002 hacking X-boxes and sharing his findings with the world. It is this sharing that makes [Bunnie] stand out. He has always shared all his findings and pushed for open source wherever it would fit. We recently discussed how Chumby, a project to which [Bunnie] contributed is coming to an end. In this interview, he talks about what the future holds for himself and how he plans to spend his time. Most interestingly, he plans on spending a year just building things he’s wanted to see built. Be sure to check out the interview to see what he’s already accomplished.

When [Bunny] moved into his apartment in Singapore he was surprised to find that a huge building project was just getting started on the other side of the block. Being the curious sort, he was always interested in what was going on, but just looking in on the project occasionally wasn’t enough. Instead, he set up a camera and made a time-lapse video.

Luckily, he’s sharing the steps he used to get Chumby capturing images. He mentions the hardest part is finding a compatible USB camera. If you have one that works with a 2008 Linux kernel you should be fine. The rest is done with shell scripts. Mplayer captures the images when the script is called from a cron job. Once all the frames are captured, he used mencoder to stitch the JPEGs into a movie. See the result after the break.

A few years back [Bunnie] took a crack at cracking the security fuses on a PIC microcontroller. Like most of the common 8-bit microcontrollers kicking around these days, the 18F1320 that he’s working with has a set of security fuses which prevent read back of the flash memory and EEPROM inside. The only way to reset those security fuses is by erasing the entire chip, which also means the data you sought in the first place would be wiped out. That is, if you were limited to using orthodox methods.

[Bunnie] had a set of the chips professionally uncapped, removing the plastic case without damaging the silicon die inside. He set to work inspecting the goodies inside with an electron microscope and managed to hammer out a rudimentary map of the layout. Turns out that flash memory can be erased with ultraviolet light, just like old EPROM chips. Microchip thought of that and placed some shielding over the security fuses to prevent them being reset in this manner. But [Bunnie] managed to do so anyway, creating an electrical tape mask to protect the rest of the data stored in the chip while bouncing UV light underneath the shielding at an angle.

The silicon hacker behind the Chumby, [bunnie huang], was browsing through the Mobile Phone Megamarket in Shenzhen, China and stumbled upon an unusual repair book. It turns out the book had the schematics to hundreds of Nokia phones. It’s hard to tell if they are legitimate, but the amount of information makes them seem so. [bunnie] claims that the book is a learning experience because it shows how some sub-circuits are implemented. Also, it can be a good reference for sourcing parts. Since Nokia buys millions of each component, the supply of parts they use are stable. There are also editions for other brands, such as Motorola and Samsung.